News

Stanford's Nobel chemistry prize honors computer science

By Lisa M. Krieger lkrieger@mercurynews.com

Posted:
10/09/2013 10:00:04 AM PDT

Updated:
10/09/2013 11:35:20 PM PDT

Professor Michael Levitt of Stanford University has been awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry, it was announced Wednesday morning. Levitt's recognition is the second Nobel awarded to Stanford this year.
(Courtesy Stanford University) (Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News)

STANFORD -- When he conceived his prestigious prizes in 1895, Alfred Nobel never imagined the need to honor an unknown field called computer science.

But the next best thing happened on Wednesday: Computing achieved a historic milestone when the Nobel Prize for chemistry went to a trio of researchers -- one of them a Stanford University professor -- for their groundbreaking work using computers to model the complex chemistry that sustains life.

"Computers in biology have not been sufficiently appreciated. Now they have been," said ebullient winner Michael Levitt of Stanford's School of Medicine, the university's second Nobel winner this week.

Levitt, a professor of structural biology at Stanford's School of Medicine, shares the $1.25 million Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Martin Karplus of Harvard University and Arieh Warshel of the University of Southern California.

On Monday, Stanford scientist Thomas Südhof shared the prize in medicine with UC Berkeley's Randy Schekman and James Rothman of Yale University.

"Biology is very complicated, and computers are powerful tools," he said. The prize, he said, offers belated "recognition of the importance of the computer in biology."

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Levitt rode computers into the modern era, learning to program with punch cards in 1967 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, when he was 20. A decade later, he was using quantum physics to model electron activity in enzymes.

Now Levitt is working to procure large "cluster computers," with thousands of processors, to study biological phenomena in real time.

The university plans to dedicate a building to holding such clusters, according to Russ Altman, Stanford professor of bioengineering, genetics and medicine.

"Computer power is absolutely critical and in many ways limits the questions we can study," Altman said.

Traditional chemical modeling -- the familiar plastic ball-and-stick molecule models, followed by messy lab work -- could not predict lightning-fast chemical reactions or depict the tiny molecular shifts of life at its most basic levels.

In an experiment, chemists usually just see the original chemical ingredients and the final results -- but rarely the process. "It's like seeing all the actors before 'Hamlet,' " said Sven Lidin, chairman of the Nobel selection committee, during the prize announcement webcast on Wednesday, "and all the dead bodies after, and then you wonder what happened in the middle."

Computer programs bring biochemistry into cyberspace, making it possible to simulate the motions of atoms during the breaking and creation of chemical bonds. Scientists can finally study complex reactions like photosynthesis and digestion and design drugs.

Computer biological models led to practical applications such as the production of human antibodies for anticancer therapy.

A native of Pretoria, South Africa, Levitt now teaches and does research at Stanford's School of Medicine.

Because he mostly deals with texts and email, he said, his phone rarely rings. So, Levitt said, he at first thought the early morning call from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was a wrong number.

Inspired by John Kendrew's BBC 1964 television series "The Thread of Life," Levitt desperately wanted to get his doctoral degree at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge. But it had no room for him.

So he took an internship at the Berkeley lab during the Bay Area's 1967 Summer of Love.

"It was a very interesting time," he said, laughing. "Maybe I inhaled sometimes."

Then he plunged into the relatively new field of structural biology and computers at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science, where his fellow Nobel laureate Arieh Warshel was then a Ph.D. student.

The institute's computer, custom-built in 1963 for $10 million, had less than one megabyte of computing power. It was named Golem, after an artificial creature in Jewish folklore.

"We had the idea about doing computer calculations on the large molecules that make life possible," he said.

He later returned to Cambridge with a wife, baby and no money to earn his Ph.D."

He went on to help develop software simulating electron activity in molecules, and by 1976 he was using quantum physics to make the first computer model of enzyme reactions, a key chemical process of the human body.

"You never really have a single 'Eureka' moment," he said. "There are a lot of small steps. Each time you solve a step, that's great -- but there's another step. It really important not to give up."

Contact Lisa M. Krieger at 650-492-4098.

Michael Levitt
2013 Nobel laureate in chemistry
Born: 1947 in Pretoria, South Africa
Education: King's College, London, undergraduate degree in physics; Ph.D., Cambridge University, 1972. Postdoctoral scholar at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel, 1972 to 1974. Joined Stanford in 1987.
Professional: Stanford School of Medicine, Department of Structural Biology. He is also a member of Bio-X, a Stanford interdisciplinary initiative uniting biology, medicine, chemistry, physics and engineering.
First computer: 1963 custom machine that cost $10 million, with less than one megabyte of memory. It was called Golem.
Personal: Married to Rina, an artist. They have three sons and three grandchildren.
Citizenship: United States, Britain and Israel
Quote: Thanking his wife, he said: "I am a very passionate scientist, but passionate scientists often make very bad husbands."